Fear

Now, this is an odd topic for a post I'm writing just an hour-and-a-half before I leave for the Virgin Islands! But it's something I've been meaning to write about since last fall-- and it's also an excuse to invite those of you in Madison to my next reading, on Tuesday evening, February 19, 7:00 PM at Avol's Bookstore, 315 W. Gorham St. I'll be reading from my unpublished (maybe never-to-be-published) memoir about fear. It's likely the only opportunity you'll have to experience any part of this magnum opus, so do come!

Last fall, someone asked me if I was afraid. "Of what?" I asked, surprised by the question, even though it came in the middle of a fairly serious conversation. I explained that I don't see any reason to be afraid of death (although I know a lot of people, especially young people are-- and I was probably afraid of it when I was younger, too). As far as I can tell, when you're dead, you're dead. It's the people who are left behind who suffer, not the dead person. The people I feel sorry for are the ones who believe in a literal heaven and hell; they must worry about where they're going to end up. Though someone explained to me that those people also believe in salvation, so they don't actually have to worry, even if they're terrible sinners. Anyway, that's clearly not my theology.

The process of dying is more problematic. Of course, I'd like to avoid pain and suffering, and especially would like not to subject friends and family to endless days and weeks of watching me suffer. But I've done what I can (having a healthcare power of attorney who knows my wishes, and a signed DNR order) to ensure that I'm not subjected to procedures that might lead to unnecessary pain and suffering. And I have a certain amount of faith in my doctors, hospice, my relatively high tolerance for pain, and the power of morphine to make the process of dying as easy as possible. And as I mentioned in December, in my post about my friend Jane Henkel, I was relieved to realize, from her experience, that a cancer death can be relatively quick and doesn't necessarily involve a weeks-long death watch.

I've thought about all this several times recently, when I heard Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, interviewed by Terry Gross, and when I read the review in the current New York Review of Books of Rieff's memoir of his mother's death. Sontag, according to Rieff, clung so fiercely to life that she insisted on an extremely painful bone marrow transplant, even though doctors said it was extremely unlikely to work, to treat her third cancer, a rare blood disease. I had previously had enormous respect for Sontag; her book, Lllness as Metaphor, came out just after I had Hodgkin's disease, and I thought it was very wise. But when I heard about Sontag's insistence (from the time she was 16, apparently) that she would not allow death to shorten her life, I was appalled at her arrogance. Not as a sixteen-year-old; most teenagers believe they're immortal, after all. But it seems to me that a highly-intelligent woman of 70 who had already survived two cancers (breast and uterine) should understand that no one lives forever; that she has been granted more than twenty years (since her first, very serious, cancer) because of her privileged economic and social status; and that gratitude and acceptance, rather than arrogance, are more appropriate responses. Though I suppose that doesn't have much to do with intelligence.

Sontag was apparently so focused on living that she refused to talk about death, or to accept that she was dying; something that continues, two years after her death, to upset her son, who felt he could only support her wishes, rather than tell her the truth about her situation. This, obviously, is so different from my attitude that it's almost incomprehensible to me. And I'm grateful both for the blog technology and for the forbearance of my readers that I am able to talk, or at least write, about the truth as I see it.

No, I'm not afraid. I'm also not dying at the moment! I'm waiting for the taxi to start me on my vacation with the sun and the pretty fishes. Back in a week or so.....